A little off the front is loads off the back

by Karen
(Wisconsin)

I am 5’11”. Three years ago I found a picture taken on Christmas Eve. I didn’t recognize the person in it. It was me. Had I really gotten THAT big? Yes. I weighed a whopping 320 pounds! Also at that time I realized I had a lot of back pain not to mention knee and foot pain…all due to the weight. I carry my weight mainly in my breasts, belly, butt and thigh area. However the bust and belly were the really big ones.

After you get to a DDD cup, there aren’t many choices in bra design and none of them can really help you with back pain once they are this excessive. My only option to be healthy and out of pain was to exercise, as I already had a healthy diet – my problem was stress and over-working at a job that I sat behind a computer all day.

I first started working out three times per week at a local gym in January of 2005. Because I was so large I picked what seemed to be the “easiest” exercises available. One was the elliptical machine. I know many people don’t consider this to be easy but it’s easier than riding a bike when your butt is that large (if you get what I mean). So I spent five minutes going as fast as I could on that machine. Any more and I was hurting too much the next day and any less I wasn’t getting my heart rate up. I combined that with ten minutes of work on a treadmill and an ab machine that you sit on. I do not remember the name of it but it is one you sit on and have these arms where you can rotate and go front to back and side to side with different amounts of resistance.

Between these three exercise machines I lost 95 pounds in six months. Considering that it took me 13 years to go from 130 pounds to 320 pounds I didn’t think that 6 months was that long. But I tell ya…the back pain actually started to decrease in three weeks. The first week I lost about 15 pounds of water weight but the main thing is I started to feel better. Choosing not to exhaust myself with exercise and moderating it…just doing it several times a week started toning up my muscles. The two machines for the heart rate before I got on the ab machine I think really helped. But toning the muscles of my abdomen is what did it for my back.

I have had a plateau here and there but I am down to 180 pounds now and a good portion of that is muscle and I still do this small work out three times a week. It takes me about a half hour including getting to the gym and getting home.